Image credit: Legal Geek

Lance Bartholomeusz, General Counsel at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, speaks to In-House Perspective about his nearly 30-year career practising humanitarian law, the complex legal issues he faces relating to refugee rights and the importance of humanising those who have been displaced.

In 2023, Lance Bartholomeusz went to visit a group of blind women living in the city of Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. He entered a small room and found a female instructor teaching young women and girls how to read and write using braille. When he asked the instructor why she was there, she replied that after being allowed the opportunity to go outside after many years of being hidden away, she wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

The Taliban had seized Afghanistan again two years prior, following the dramatic withdrawal of US troops from the country, and subsequently severely restricted women’s access to education. The Taliban's return came 20 years after it was first ousted from power in 2001. Speaking of his experience in Jalalabad, Bartholomeusz says it ‘was one of those moments that makes everything worthwhile to be supporting people and their incredible resilience’.

Bartholomeusz is General Counsel at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Founded in 1950, the UN Refugee Agency provides emergency response and humanitarian assistance to refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced and stateless people. The Agency also works with governments to interpret and apply international legal frameworks to help protect and enforce the rights of refugees. Bartholomeusz oversees a global team consisting of 25 lawyers and a few administrative staff, who are based in Geneva, Nairobi, Pretoria, Bangkok, Copenhagen and Budapest.

A ‘long and winding road’

Bartholomeusz grew up in Australia and hadn’t always been clear-eyed about his intention to pursue a career in humanitarian law. At 12, he wanted to be a snake handler, until he was bitten while removing one of the reptiles from a pool at his friend's house. ‘I worried I might have to change my idea of what I would do,’ he says. Fortunately, Bartholomeusz enjoyed debating and politics at school and by the time he graduated, he’d decided he would become a lawyer.

The route into humanitarian law and to the UNHCR was a ‘long and winding road’, says Bartholomeusz. He began his career at a law firm in Australia before he clerked for the President of the Queensland Court of Appeal. In the late 1990s, he moved to England and worked for the Insolvency Service in the Department for Business and Trade, where he managed bankruptcies and investigated alleged misconduct by company directors.

In 2000, the UN hired Bartholomeusz as a legal officer for its Compensation Commission, where he handled claims relating to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which began the 1991 Gulf War. During a mission to Kuwait, Bartholomeusz says he had a ‘light bulb’ moment about dedicating his professional life to humanitarian and international law. ‘I met some amazing people who were claimants and Palestinians who had literally walked from Palestine in the 50s and 60s and made a life for themselves in Kuwait and that [life] had all come to pieces,’ he says.

The experience inspired Bartholomeusz to obtain a Master’s in international law from the Geneva Graduate Institute, which enabled him to secure a role as the Director of Legal Affairs at the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). There he oversaw its operations across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon between 2004 and 2016. ‘I landed my dream job working and living in the Gaza Strip for the UNRWA, in an international law job, where international law mattered for lives,’ he says.

For the past decade, Bartholomeusz has acted as General Counsel at the UN Refugee Agency. There, he handles many of the same issues that a general counsel at any multinational business might encounter. A major difference, however, is the possibility for him to be called in to assist a colleague who has been thrown out of a country or detained – situations that require a rapid response.

The most complex legal issue the agency faces in protecting refugee rights, he says, is where the parties in an armed conflict fail to follow the international standards that apply to those people who are forced to flee their homes. ‘Sudan has created one of the largest refugee situations. And it seems that the need to respect civilians, notably women and children, and civilian infrastructure has been ignored in a very vicious war,’ he says. The country is considered to have the world’s largest forced displacement crisis, with 14.3 million people fleeing their homes, according to UN statistics from April. The figure exceeds that of Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine, respectively.

Adapting to modern challenges

The number of people who have been forcibly displaced has nearly doubled over the past decade, with 117 million people compelled to flee their homes by mid-2025, according to the UNHCR. Yet the Agency’s funding has remained the same, a result of significant and ongoing cuts to humanitarian aid globally.

Bartholomeusz says that while the main drivers of forced displacement – armed conflict and political persecution – haven’t changed, the complexity of the issue has increased, largely because of the harmful impacts of the climate crisis. ‘We’ve seen more extreme weather that has exacerbated situations where there is a conflict,’ he says. ‘The majority of people who are forced to flee their homes are either coming from areas that are subject to extreme weather or are highly climate vulnerable.’ Bartholomeusz adds that the international community should take the climate crisis ‘very seriously’.

He is confident that the 1951 Refugee Convention is flexible enough to deal with modern issues such as climate displacement but says that its implementation by states could be improved by being better informed by human rights. The 2025 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), affirming that states have obligations under international human rights law to prevent climate change, could help with this. ‘We’ve seen from the ICJ advisory opinion on climate the important role that human rights have,’ he says. ‘There are developments that could take place so that the realities of climate, for example the movement of people, could be more clearly addressed’ as well as ‘the relative rights and responsibilities of states and people affected.’

Another major challenge for the UNHCR in protecting refugee rights is the rise in international conflicts and that it’s taking longer for governments to resolve them. In a speech at the UN General Assembly in September, António Guterres, the organisation’s Secretary-General, warned that ‘rising geopolitical tensions and divisions, chronic uncertainty and mounting financial strain’ are major threats to global peace and humanity.

Despite this, the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria in 2024 and the ongoing repatriation of Syrian refugees has provided a small glimmer of hope. ‘Where there is an opportunity for peace to break out, as we saw with Syria after a long conflict, this is something we need to invest in strongly to make peace hold,’ says Bartholomeusz.

The UNHCR is closely involved in humanitarian efforts to help prepare Syrians for returning home. In partnership with local NGOs, the agency is monitoring the situation when people do reach home to ensure living conditions are in line with international standards. According to UN statistics from January, nearly 1.4 million refugees have returned to Syria from neighbouring countries since December 2024.

Bartholomeusz says that, at times when international conflict is growing, the sharing of responsibility between states to manage the costs and logistics of displacement becomes even more important. Most refugees are hosted by low- and middle-income nations that are neighbouring crisis zones. ‘We should help the host countries to be able to host refugees in dignity and in a way that supports their self-reliance,’ he says. ‘Inclusion, getting a bank account, access to SIM cards; these have a big impact on the ability of refugees to be reliant on their own entrepreneurship and hard work rather than scarce aid’.

Humanising refugees

The rise of social media, populist leaders and worsening economic inequality have led to increased polarisation within many societies. Refugees have become a scapegoat for a decline in living standards, with misinformation, hate speech and political attacks driving anti-refugee sentiment. Bartholomeusz says that ‘facts are the great casualty’ of the moment and that the UNHCR does its best to educate the public about the positive impact of refugees on societies. The agency has also built a digital gateway for refugees to learn about their rights in different countries and how they can access support.

Bartholomeusz says it’s vital to humanise refugees in order to successfully counter polarisation. ‘Once you have met refugees and appreciate they are a parent like me, or someone who has a great idea and wants to put it into action, that humanisation creates empathy,’ he says.

The UNHCR works closely with its Goodwill Ambassadors, including actors Ben Stiller and Cate Blanchett, to promote the voices of refugees on social media in order to encourage people to identify with their stories. ‘We are looking at the way in which AI and the smart use of social media can be used to meet […] polarisation and misinformation on the same playing field,’ he says.

The UNHCR is also exploring opportunities to leverage technology and AI to improve its ability to deliver humanitarian action. In partnership with the private sector, the agency has built predictive analytics tools for displacement to help inform and speed up its response to emergencies. The agency also recently launched the Geneva Legal Tech Accelerator, which aims to transform and digitise legal operations across humanitarian and international organisations in the Swiss city to increase efficiency and strengthen digital skills among legal professionals.

Bartholomeusz isn’t naïve, though, to the risks that AI poses to human rights and says the UNHCR endeavours to use all technology ‘safely and responsibly’. The agency is acutely aware of the importance of data privacy and security, particularly in the context of armed conflicts where the location of refugees could be exposed – with serious consequences for their safety. ‘It is about being practical and building [in] proper AI and tech governance processes,’ he says.

The moments that ‘give you oxygen’

When working in a field that often deals with immense human suffering, Bartholomeusz says it’s important not to focus on the setbacks and that ‘realistic optimism’ is required to make a real change. ‘In the humanitarian world pessimism is a privilege for those who are well off,’ he says. ‘Refugees don’t need your pessimism because if you’ve got nothing, like many refugees, the only things that you have are hope, love and community.’

For those working in the field, having a passion or hobby outside work that allows you to switch off is also recommended. In his spare time, Bartholomeusz is an accomplished double bass player and finds that travelling around the world and playing in orchestras helps to soothe his busy mind. ‘I love it because when you are playing a Beethoven or a Mahler symphony, you can’t be thinking about the emails at work, [or about] a terrible situation in X country, you’ve just got to be in the moment,’ he says.

Bartholomeusz has had many rewarding moments in his career that have given him the motivation to carry on. These include witnessing Kyrgyzstan become the first country in the world to eliminate statelessness within its borders in 2019. Working with the UNHCR, the government successfully identified and granted full citizenship to over 13,000 undocumented people who were left without nationality following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another stand-out occasion was his trip to Afghanistan, where he discovered the instructor teaching the blind women how to use braille. ‘Those are the big moments, they give you oxygen,’ he says.